


Aftermath

by LazySundayMusings



Category: Peter Kay's Car Share (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-16
Updated: 2019-01-23
Packaged: 2019-10-11 02:52:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17438543
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LazySundayMusings/pseuds/LazySundayMusings
Summary: Set in the hours after the final.





	1. Chapter 1

It was during the fourth repeat of “Car Share Buddy” when it became obvious that the batteries were on their way out, and Kayleigh reluctantly pressed Stop on the Walkman. With that distraction gone John became aware of slight cramp in his right hand and it was with an apologetic expression that he extracted Kayleigh’s fingers from his own.  
Once the feeling was back in his fingers, and after quickly drying his hand on his shirt, he again reached for her hand then looked around. “Where are we?” he asked softly. It was the first thing he’d said since they’d got on the bus.  
“Two stops away, then a short walk.”  
He nodded. But without the distraction of the music he felt very self-conscious, wanting to sit and just gaze at her but worried how he’d come across if he succumbed to the urge to stare. So he feigned an interest in the area the bus was passing through, turning towards Kayleigh while acting like he was looking past her through the side and rear windows. In doing so he brought his face close to her hair, and took the opportunity to indulge in the now-faint smell of her perfume. The familiar scent combined with their closeness to give him a sense of calm. He smiled and gave her hand a gentle squeeze.  
She looked up at him. “What?” she mouthed.  
He leaned closer to her ear. “You smell wonderful,” he whispered.  
She smiled, then sighed. “It’s lovely that you’re seeing me home, after everything that’s happened.” She looked embarrassed for a moment. “I had thought I might be able to drop you home but now I’m thinking Mandy could be out with Chloe... and I don’t think a double on one of Steve’s bikes is a good idea, do you? But we can call you a cab from home.”  
“It’s all right - I’ve an idea. I’ll give Jim a call when we get off. He’s working on some townhouses somewhere around here, and this shouldn’t be far out of his way. If I catch him in time.”

John had the phone to his ear within seconds of Kayleigh leading him off the bus.  
“Come on, come on...  
Jim! How are ya?  
That’s good. Any chance of a favour? Are you still around Bury at the moment? Good. Can I catch a lift home? Yeah? Oh, thanks mate.  
What? Um... long story, but Little Red’s a bit broken. No, we’re all right. Yep, both of us.  
I’ll send the address as a text, save any confusion. Cheers, I owe you one. See ya soon.”

John had no sooner sent the text than he received a call from an unfamiliar number.  
“John Redmond.  
Yes it is.  
Oh. None at all? Monday. Right.  
Any idea about.... okay... okay... right.  
Well then, I’ll talk to you again later. Bye.”

“Insurance company. Can’t get me a hire car until Monday-lunchtime at the earliest.”  
“Oh. That’s a bit shit. Did they say anything about your car?”  
“Just that it’s got no door.” His attempted joke went nowhere. “They’ll call back in the next hour or so to give me an idea how bad it is, but it doesn’t look good.”  
She took his hand and they continued to walk, this time in silence.

Once within sight of the small Bury house a thought struck John. He let go of her hand and reached for his phone.  
“Shit. I’m got work with Cath tomorrow. I’ll see if she can give me a lift in.”  
“Can you not just take the bus?”  
“We’re meant to be starting at seven o’clock, but the Saturday morning timetable is a disaster so...  
Hi Cath, how are you?  
Good, good...  
Um, bit of a problem, though... can I get a lift in with you in the morning?  
It’s a bit broken.  
No door.  
No, no, she’s fine. We’re both fine.  
Oh, thank you.  
6:45 outside mine? Got it. See you tomorrow then.  
Thanks Cath. Bye. Bye.”  
John put the phone back in his pocket with a sigh of relief.

Kayleigh looked at him quizzically. “Wait - since when do you work on Saturdays?”  
“It’s to do another lump of ugly admin-shit for Christmas, an all-dayer most likely, based on what’s left to do. But then we’ll have our suppliers lined up and the Christmas team can then just crack on with things.”  
Her face fell.  
He winced. “Oh shit. I didn’t think... I’m sorry, I need to go in tomorrow, it’s been organised for ages now.”  
“Hey, hey. It’s fine. You didn’t know today was going to turn out like this. It’s... fine. Really.”  
“Yeah, but I’m just... I don’t want to...” John took a deep breath. “I hate that I’ll have to wait until we’re both at work on Monday before I see you again, that’s all. I won’t be picking you up until Tuesday, remember?”  
Kayleigh paused, then smiled and looked straight into his eyes. “Have you not heard of Sundays, then?”  
“Oh! Oh, yeah. Of course. So, um... would you like to do something on Sunday? We could go out for lunch somewhere, and then... I don’t know... see what we feel like after that?”  
Kayleigh took John’s hand. “I’d love that.”


	2. Chapter 2

Kayleigh and John arrived at the small Bury house and proceeded to relate most of the day’s events to Mandy and Steve. John led the introductions when Jim arrived shortly afterwards, but when Jim couldn’t resist the urge to help Steve hunt down the latest oil leak John and Kayleigh took the opportunity to walk a few yards away for some semi-private time together.

Mandy had initially rolled her eyes when Jim and Steve took an interest in the fresh oil stain under the tatty Triumph, but then noted with concern that the initial intimacy between John and Kayleigh seemed to be fading. They were no longer holding hands, were standing close but not actually facing each other, John with his hands in his pockets and Kayleigh holding her bag.  
Her comment “Uh oh,” was enough to catch the attention of the amateur oil sleuths.  
The trio could see the tension between them, could sense their connection was in danger of fizzling out if nothing happened, but it was obvious neither John nor Kayleigh seemed able to make a move.  
Mandy summed it up for the three of them. “Oh, this is painful.”  
Jim thought for a second. “It’s all right - I’ve got this.” He turned to them. “It was really nice meeting you both.” Then to Steve - “Do you think you could have over-tightened it and stripped the thread?”  
“Oh - didn’t think of that. Thanks mate.”  
“You can check it later,” Mandy whispered.  
Jim walked over to John and Kayleigh and cleared his throat. “Sorry bud, but we have to get going. Karen and Peter are coming over and I still have to get dinner sorted.” He shrugged, smiled, said “Nice to finally meet you, Kayleigh,” then gave John a slow nod before heading towards his car.

John watched him briefly then turned back to Kayleigh. “Hey... on Sunday, how about we go somewhere for breakfast? Leaves us most of the day to do... whatever else.”  
“Could we make it a late breakfast? No need to rush things on our first day out and about. We could go get a couple of Fat Boys, work on getting you that baseball cap.”  
John shook his head. “They’re not open on weekends. Pity, really.”  
“Oh. Well, that’s okay - I’m sure we’ll find somewhere nice.”  
“Hmmm.” His eyes briefly flicked across to Jim’s car. “I... um... I’d better go.”  
“Okay.” Kayleigh nodded, then leaned in and kissed him quickly on the cheek. “Call me later?”  
“Yep,” he replied with a smile.  
But as she made to move away he heard himself say “Wait.”  
This time John leaned in, but rather than a quick peck, he pressed and held his lips against her cheek, savouring both the sensation of her skin and her perfume. When he pulled his face back slightly Kayleigh turned until her lips brushed against his, and a moment later they were sharing their first true kiss. Then their second. Then their third. All with an ease, a familiarity that surprised and delighted them both.  
“Or,” said John with a calmness he certainly didn’t feel, “or, you could call me...”

Mandy nudged Steve. “Well, well,” she whispered.  
Steve mock-groaned. “Please don’t make me stay up with you two while you talk about this all night.”  
Jim, who had been keeping an eye on proceedings, simply counted to ten then started the car. 

Neither man had spoken in the fifteen minutes since they’d driven away from the small Bury house, with only the cricket commentary on the car radio breaking the silence. John noted the time showing on the dashboard. “It’s going to be a very late dinner if you’ve not got everything worked out yet, isn’t it?”  
“What do you mean? Of course I’ve got everything sorted.”  
“Hang on, so... you said that so I’d...?”  
“Get on with it. Exactly.”  
John shook his head, smiling. “You’re unbelievable, you.”  
Jim grinned at him. “You’re welcome.”

As they crawled along in peak-traffic, John had plenty of time to bring Jim up to speed with most of the events of the previous two days. Jim showed polite interest for most of it - relationships weren’t one of his strengths, as he’d recently found out - but it was the crash that caught his attention. “Wait, so you were stopped, door open, about to get out and then - whack? Maybe a couple of seconds away from...?”  
“Yep.”  
“You’d have seen it coming...”  
“Probably, yeah.”  
The growing realisation of what had nearly happened was starting to make John feel sick to his stomach, so he tried to send the conversation sideways. “Little Red should be fixable, right?”  
Jim mused on that. “Well, it depends.”  
“That’s not helpful.”  
“If it was a clean break,” Jim continued, “with no real damage other than to the hinges they’ll probably decide it’s worth a repair. But if there was any twisting or cracking where the door is mounted onto the car body - then no. They’ll say it’s not economical to repair and pay you out.”  
“Wait - what?”  
“That’s part of the main structure that everything hangs off, depends on. If it’s damaged, that possibly means plenty of work to make sure it’s absolutely safe, and if it’s too much they’ll just say No. You’ll get paid out, they’ll strip it for parts and crush the rest of it.”  
John wasn’t convinced.  
“It’s for the best. You remember that spate of accidents a while back where cars had been crashed but repaired on the cheap by backyard cowboys? Don’t want that happening again.”  
“Sure, sure...”

Two hours later John was sitting at his table, trying to find some enthusiasm for the bowl of pale microwaved pasta in front of him. The only items he had retrieved from the broken Fiat were a few coins and two audio cables, and these were sitting on his table next to the two sets of now-orphaned car keys. He’d had a brief phone conversation with the rep from the insurance company, who had called to pass on the fate of the red Fiat - “uneconomical to repair”.  
He’d asked the obvious question - “but it’s just the door, right?” - but when the response included the clinical phrase “compromised passenger cell” he knew it was all over.

The remaining items he wanted - the beaded seat cover, a notebook detailing his fuel use, first aid kit, wipes and a small emergency kit - were bagged up in the Fiat and he’d collect them on Monday after he’d collected his hire car. A small petrol hatchback. “Better not make a mistake filling that up,” he thought, “or you’ll never hear the end of it.”


	3. Chapter 3

After dinner Mandy banished the rest of the family to the front room, leaving herself and Kayleigh alone in the kitchen with a defenceless bottle of wine. “So then,” she said as she started to pour, “how exactly is it that he’s got you smiling again?”  
“He wrote me a song.”  
“So? He sings in his band, right?”  
“No, no - he wrote me a song. Overnight. For me.”  
“Right, right. Well, it must have been good, because you spent last night going from looking like thunder to being devastated, and back again. And now... you could be in a toothpaste ad.”

“Do you want to hear it?”  
“Sure, I guess.”  
“You’ve got to swear that you won’t tell anyone you’ve heard this. Especially John.”  
“You’re joking, aren’t ya?”  
“He said it was just for me. You’ll understand when you hear it.”  
“Fine. I swear.”  
Kayleigh looked dubious.  
Mandy lifted her right hand. “Look, I’m swearing all right? Give.”  
Kayleigh pulled the Walkman from her bag and slid it across the table, along with the Post-It note. “That was in the parcel with it.”  
Mandy read John’s message. “What? Why would he write his surname on a note to you? Did he think you would have forgotten his name overnight?” She smirked. “Or have you been keeping a lot of Johns on the go?”  
Kayleigh put her hand on the Walkman. “Yeah, you’re funny. Do you want a listen or not?”  
“Fine.” Mandy looked at the earphones in semi-disgust, then put them in and pressed Play.

Kayleigh could hear the sightly tinny sound from the earphones in the otherwise silent room, and started silently mouthing the words to the song she now knew as well as any other. Mandy smiled at this and started slowly nodding her head along with the music, but then sat still as she realised what John was actually saying.

Kayleigh was aware that the song was ending and waited for Mandy’s reaction, but what she got was “Wait, is he telling you...? I’m rewinding that.”

Kayleigh sat back with a smile and sipped her wine as her sister listened again, her expression more intense than the first time. When the song finished Mandy stopped the tape and sat quietly for a moment before removing the earphones.

“Oh. No wonder you’ve had the lovey-dovey face.” She pointed at the Walkman. “That’s not what I expected from the man who said he’ll never get married and all women are nuts. Did you have any idea he could do that?”  
“I’ve seen videos on Youtube of him singing songs he’s written for the band, but they are fun and... poppy, I guess.” She looked at the Walkman. “Nothing like that.”

“And when he says that he needs time to figure things out... that’s fine, but are you going to hold him to that?”  
“I’ll hold him, all right.”  
“Not what I meant and you know it.”  
“I’ve told him I’ll wait, but not forever.”  
“All right. Okay.”

Kayleigh watched Mandy tap the Post-It. “What?”  
“There’s something I don’t understand.”  
“Which is?”  
“The parcel. He left it with Steve early this morning, right? You could have just thrown it in the bin, never known what was in it, but you kept it, opened it. Why?”  
Kayleigh took a moment. “I was curious. For him to be dropping off something so early... I figured I’d at least look. And you read the note - of course I’d give it a listen. If he’d sent it in an email like he’d first thought, I probably wouldn’t even look at it for days yet, and even then I might just delete it on the spot.”  
“So the effort made the difference? Might pay to remember that next time you...”  
The John-specific text-alert from Kayleigh’s phone interrupted Mandy’s train of thought and became Kayleigh’s sole focus. Mandy sat quietly as Kayleigh tapped out a quick message and then put her phone down, all with a smile she’d not seen for a long time.

“John was saying goodnight. Sorry Mand - what were you saying?”  
“Never mind. So, what about Mr Finally Said The Right Thing? You will see him before Monday, right? Tomorrow?”  
“Um, Sunday. He has an early start at work tomorrow - seven o’clock on a Saturday if you can believe that - doing an all-dayer to get things ready for December and the Christmas promotions.”  
“Isn’t that the Christmas Team work you’re doing? Why aren’t you working tomorrow then?”  
“There’s a couple of them in to work on more of the admin-shit as he calls it - staffing and stock levels and suppliers and... weather forecasts, I think he said once.”  
“Right... can he not just bunk off for the afternoon, say, and go somewhere with you?”  
“It’s been organised for a couple of weeks, and he said it needs to be done so they can get everything finalised for the Christmas team to get on with. Anyway - he’s doing that all day tomorrow, but we’re meeting in town on Sunday for a late breakfast.”  
“Isn’t he picking you up?”  
”The insurance company can’t sort a hire car for him until Monday afternoon. So it’ll be like when we were kids, jumping on the bus and heading into town to meet up with friends and whoever.”  
“I’d drop you in, but we’re taking the terrors to see Steve’s mum and dad.”  
“I know, it’s all right.”  
Mandy grinned. “Did you suggest a late breakfast because you can’t get up early enough?”  
“Yes. Shut up.”

************

John’s total sleep the previous night had been made up of two short naps - the first after copying Kayleigh’s completed song to the cassette tape, and the second between returning from his dawn-run to Bury then heading to work.  
The relief that she’d listened, accepted his words and forgiven his behaviour of the previous day had given him some peace and allowed him to be functional at work, while the adrenaline from the near-miss had given him a boost through into the early evening. But the adrenaline-shot was done and he was now struggling.  
John had eaten as much of the pasta as he could stand, laid out everything he’d need for the morning and sent Kayleigh his usual goodnight-text, albeit with a much more personal tone than before. But he wouldn’t get into bed in case he went to sleep before he saw her reply. However long it took.

And then it arrived.  
“Good night, sweet dreams xxxx”

Before today, texts and emails that ended with anything like "xx" had tended to rub John the wrong way. They’d reminded him of the the ridiculous air-kisses, the ‘mwah, mwah’ nonsense.  
But not any more. 

It was with no small sense of relief that he finally got into bed, desperate for sleep. But that same desperation turned against him and kept him awake, unable to escape his own thoughts.

By rights he should be dead. 

It seemed that every time he closed his eyes for more than a few seconds all he could see was the blur as the van tore past.  
The van had been found a few minutes later having run off the road, the young driver unconscious but in one piece. She had fallen asleep at the wheel after a 17-hour day and had no recollection of the previous hour, let alone the moment when she charged through the intersection and consigned the red Fiat to the scrapyard in an instant.  
If it had been two seconds later he would be dead. No question.

John made the mistake of looking at the alarm clock. 12:50 AM. “Shit.” He had to be up in five hours, could not go without sleep yet again, could not turn up for work in the morning and be utterly useless. Cath deserved better than that, having given up her Saturday to help him finish the prep work for December/January, and not for the first time.  
There was nothing for it. John got up, went to the bathroom cabinet and took two of the mild sedatives he’d been hoping to avoid. Not because they didn’t work - most of the time, anyway - but because of the occasional side effects. Especially the nightmares. He crossed his fingers. Maybe tonight would be different.  
Maybe.


End file.
